


rhymes from another summer

by deletable_bird



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Classical Music, First Meetings, Inspired by Music, M/M, Piano, Slash, dan is awkward
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-25
Updated: 2015-09-25
Packaged: 2018-04-23 08:39:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4870419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deletable_bird/pseuds/deletable_bird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Dan is a mysterious pianist and Phil's just moved in.<br/><br/>Translation into Russian/русский available <a href="https://ficbook.net/readfic/4469273">here</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	rhymes from another summer

**Author's Note:**

> [ _disclaimer_ ](http://deletablebird.tumblr.com/d)

_Ingénue, what have we done to you?_  
_Under that soft skin_  
_I hear a ticking_  
_The currency of being twenty-three_  
_It turns from gold to dust_  
_When you crest the wave of lust_  
_So take all you can_  
_From the mouth of man_

―"Ingenue", Death Cab for Cutie

* * *

It was the third night in the new London flat that you heard the music first. It was a piano, clearly, and an achingly beautiful melody that even you recognized; _Für Elise_. You sat there, at your makeshift dinner table of a milk crate, the floor, with a book of Lovecraft balanced on one knee, and listened, captivated by the echoing notes, skipping from haunting to quick to haunting, for an embarrassing amount of time.

When it stopped, you actually jumped. The bowl of cereal precariously held up by your slack fingers and the edge of the milk crate tipped to the point of spilling and you yelped and righted it as fast as you could. You felt a bit as if you were in some kind of otherworld, half a ghost and half really sitting on porcelain kitchen tiles.

If you were a braver kind of person, you would have gone up and introduced yourself to the player in the flat above you. You didn’t.

* * *

The second time, you were nearly properly moved in and had your laptop lopsided across your knees, one of your old friends’ face pixellated and smiling on Skype. The first notes were quiet enough to pass you by, but when they started falling together like the pieces of a glass puzzle you shushed your friend and listened.

It was five minutes of the faintest, ghostliest music, sad enough to cause a lump in the back of your throat with the mistiest unfurling of happiness carried along the top of the notes. When it faded out, you took the deepest breath you had taken all day and said goodbye.

Your feet were restless from the Moonlight Sonata and loneliness, and even a night of walking couldn’t still them.

* * *

Late summer was your favorite time, and leaning out of windows was another thing you rather enjoyed. Add the two together; it’s rather easy to guess where you were the third time you heard the music.

It drifted out from the window right above yours and you took a breath in so sharply that you nearly choked on thin air. With your arms wrapped around yourself from the slowly growing cold, you listened to the piano, the music brave but fragile, trying to hold on to the last streaks of sun painting the London skyline, the sky clear for the first time in a long time.

It was a few days before you worked up the courage to leave the note on the radiator on the landing, the radiator you knew the mystery pianist had to walk past every time they left their flat. It also took you quite possibly years to come up with six simple words. _What song was that last Wednesday?_

It was Saturday afternoon when you came home from a day pounding the pavement to find a scrap of cheap notebook paper on the corner of the radiator, with six incomprehensible words scrawled across it. You Googled them that evening over cup-o-noodle and Ribena, and found out what _Comptine d'un Autre Été: L’après-midi_ really meant.

It was a long time before you got those six words out of your head.

* * *

The fourth time you heard the piano, it was stuttered and interspersed with long breaks, and there was laughter drifting out of the window alongside it.

The pianist had a friend, and you barely slept that night.

* * *

_A humble request to the pianist: Liebestraüme no. 3 in A flat_

You made sure to clap as loud as you could when the drama had faded away into the clouds. The return note gave you a hastily scrawled tumblr url and an attempted mess of a smiley face. You stood there, grinning stupidly at the radiator, for a mortifying ten minutes. Your thoughts tended to wander when concerned with the mystery pianist.

Maybe the pianist did have a friend, but you could sleep that night anyway.

* * *

The first notes drifted down the stairs and made your heart do a pathetic little hop-skip-and-jump. You had no idea what the music was, but it was drenched in emotion, and halfway through you slid off the couch and crept upstairs.

The steps were petrifyingly creaky but you managed to get past them as a waterfall of high notes tinkled, scintillating, past your ears, and stood there on the landing, straining to capture every chord. The sound was infinitely better outside the mystery pianist’s door, which was _mysteriously_ open. 

The piece went on forever, and ever, and you didn’t want it to stop.

You nearly looked inside the flat above yours, but something held you back.

And when you stumbled out of your front door and banged your left knee against the goddamn radiator on the way to Tesco’s the next morning, _Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2_ followed you about all day.

* * *

It was nearly a week later when the first piercingly high keys echo down the stairs, and the tune that followed actually had your grin wide enough to hurt. You’d recognize the Nyancat song anywhere.

The baker’s dozen of raspberry jam doughnuts you left on the radiator that night was not the most impressive gift you’d ever bought, but the mystery pianist replaced them the next morning with an endearingly messy note reading only _thanks_.

 _That’s one thing you’ve done right today, Phil,_ you told yourself, and there was a bounce in your step until the sun was long gone.

* * *

Weeks pass. You get a job. You get to know people. You don’t hear the piano.

There are nights, lying in a new bed in a still unfamiliar place, when all you want to do is throw off your blankets and run upstairs to say hello. You never do. You always want to.

Sometimes you wake up, the clock’s glowing numbers grating against your brain and telling you to go to sleep, and think you hear notes drifting down the stairs. You’ll stand between your open door and the radiator on the landing, and listen to nothing, and regret.

Every passing day, it seems as if you’ll never get a chance to meet the pianist. You make a list of the songs they’ve played and you listen on Youtube but nothing really matches having the music echoing through the walls of the mystery room of the mystery man upstairs.

* * *

The clock says four a.m. You scrub a hand over your eyes and reckon that the piano’s just part of a half-dream.

* * *

The guy standing outside your door is taller than you by barely an inch, slouched with his hands shoved deep in his pockets and his eyes glinting at you through an emo fringe that desperately needs a trim.

“Hi,” he tells you, “I’m a neighbor. Just thought I’d greet you officially, yeah?”

“Yeah,” you agree. “Come in. I’m Phil.”

“Dan.” He shakes your hand. His hand’s the same size as yours, his fingers a bit chilly.

“Tea?”

“Yeah. I mean, sure, thanks.”

He sits awkwardly at your kitchen table and takes a drink of the tea right after you set it down. It slops over the side as he practically drops the mug, hissing through his teeth.

“Fuck!”

“You all right?” You’re amused, but you’re too nice to actually laugh at some poor stranger who’s just burnt their tongue.

“Yeah. Fuck,” he says again, “I mean shit, I mean, sorry. You got an ice cube? Sorry.”

You fetch him a tray of ice and he cracks a cube out, sucking on it. His eyes flutter shut, and his hand comes up to cover his mouth for a second. Your eyes lock onto his fingers, long, thin. Pianist fingers?

“How long have you been living here?” you ask him. He looks a bit frantic and shifts the ice about in his mouth, and you realize how undignified it would be to have your guest talk with their mouth all full.

“Oh, I’m,” you start, but he just ducks his head like a heron and spits the ice out into his hand.

“Just about a year,” he says, and turns the shade of a tomato.

“Oh,” you repeat weakly. “I, um, I moved here from Manchester. Just about two months ago.”

“How’s life been here, then?” he asks. “Got a job and all?”

“Yeah, pretty nice,” you say. “Not the best, but, I mean, you’ve got to make do with what you can get when you’re moving out of your parents’ basement.”

“Big change?”

“A bit. Been wanting to get out of there for a while, though, so it’s nice. When half the guests over still treat you like you’re five and the other half look at you as if you’re a creeper, you know it’s time to bid the family goodbye.”

He laughs, a surprised laugh, with a smile that makes a dimple come out, and you can’t help but grin back. You tell him knock-knock jokes to make it reappear, and whenever you succeed it’s the best feeling in the world.

The ice cube is long past melted by the time he finally leaves.

* * *

“It was really nice meeting you, er, Phil.”

“You too, um, Dan.”

You want to kiss that smile.

“See you around then, I guess.”

“Come back soon!”

God, his eyes are the best when he grins. “You can count on it.”

* * *

He visits you so often that by the time the next weekend rolls around, you can almost say the word _piano_ around him. Almost.

* * *

For some reason, he loves your stupid knock-knock jokes. You love his laugh. It’s a good balance.

* * *

He starts playing again next Wednesday. The melody this time is terribly, wonderfully pretty, light-hearted and hopeful. Brave. Wanting. It makes your stomach flip and your feet carry you up the stairs.

You knock on the open door and call in, “Dan? You there?”

The piano stutters to a halt and his footsteps pad down the hall until he’s standing in the doorway. His face when he meets your eyes is the best thing you’ve ever seen.

“Phil! Hi! I was just, um―”

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

He leads you straight to his room, opening the door before turning around with a mildly horrified look on his face. “Oh God, wow, I should probably just take you to the lounge, I mean―”

“No,” you tell him, “this is ok. This is great.”

“Oh,” and he opens the door the rest of the way and points you to his bed. It creaks when you sit down, and your eyes go straight to the piano.

It’s light wood and straight lines, not extraordinary but your heart skips when you see it with Dan sitting on its bench anyway. “You play?” you ask, and mentally kick yourself for such a stupid question.

“Not well,” he says, not meeting your eyes.

“Not bad, though,” you tell him, and he looks up with a small smile before turning his cheek against his shoulder and gripping the edge of the bench.

“How’ve you been?” you ask. “Haven’t seen you in awhile.”

“No, I’m a bit busy. My mum and dad are moving and it’s a fight between my brother and me who’s going to have to help them.”

“Oh, my parents did that a few years back, only my aunt ended up helping them instead. The amount of talking about the move was vastly disproportionate to the actual moving―” you stop. Your face heats up. “Sorry, I just―that was rude, talking about me when you’ve got big stuff going on.”

“No, you can keep going,” Dan says, running his fingers along the black keys. “I don’t mind at all.”

“You sure?”

“Very. I just. I really like the way you talk,” he says, not meeting your eyes, his gaze fixed on his own hands. You like his hands.

“What, my sexy Northern accent?” you say, sarcastic, and he meets your eyes dead serious.

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” There’s a pause so tense is hurts, and then, blurting out, “would you play for me?”

“Oh!” You want to kiss the surprise off of his face, want to kiss that smile back on. “Yeah, of course. What should I―?”

“Anything. I don’t―I couldn’t care less, just play.”

He shifts on the bench, adjusts his fingers on the keys and plays the same song he was in the middle of when you ran upstairs. It makes your tongue clumsy and your hands and feet light, and your stomach tie itself in knots.

He plays and plays. You love the way his posture changes when he plays, how his sleeves slip over his wrists and how his long long fingers move across the keys, how his head turns and his eyes close in time and he sways ever so slightly with the melody.

By the time _Ingenue_ trickles to a gentle stop you’re sat on the bench beside him. He looks at you out of eyes the colour of melted chocolate.

“Knock knock,” you say. He grins, turns his head against his shoulder again. Shy. Happy. “Who’s there?”

“Me,” you whisper, your fingers under his chin, and kiss him.

* * *

_You know like the back of your hand_  
_Who let them in_  
_You got me into this mess so_  
_You get me out . . . well you know it_  
_Gone with a touch of your hand_

―“Ingenue”, Thom Yorke


End file.
